Palm Beach County, Florida, is in the news again for another election mishap. This time the culprit isn't the county's infamous butterfly ballot that made headlines in the 2000 presidential race. Instead, the problem is ballots used with the county's new $5.5 million optical-scan machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems.More than 3,000 optical-scan ballots have mysteriously disappeared since the county held an election last Tuesday.

According to tallies a week ago, a total of 102,523 ballots were cast in the election. But according to a recount of one of the races, which was completed this last Sunday, the total number of cast ballots was only 99,045 -- a difference of 3,478. Election officials say they can't explain the discrepancy, though critics are concerned that this is a precursor to problems that could arise in the November presidential election.

The problem was discovered only because the county was conducting a recount of a close judicial race between an incumbent, 15th Circuit Judge Richard Wennet, and his challenger William Abramson. Prior to the recount, Abramson had won the election by 17 votes; but the recount flipped the race and resulted in him losing the election to Wennet by 60 votes. The total number of votes cast in that specific race dropped by 2,900 between the time ballots were counted last Tuesday and the recount.

Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Arthur Anderson said the
discrepancy in the number of votes cast in the judicial race was likely
due to the extra sensitivity of optical-scan machines used in the
recount, which are different from optical-scan machines that counted
the ballots on Election Day. The seven high-speed tabulating machines
used in the recount are much more "unforgiving" than those that
processed the votes on election day, he told the Palm Beach Post.

Although none of the articles about this issue explain what Anderson
meant by this, presumably the machines used to count the votes on
Election Day were precinct-based scanners, which are used on site at
polling locations, while the recount was done on central-count
scanners, which are used to count ballots at a county headquarters.

If optical-scan machines are calibrated poorly or inconsistently, they
will sometimes read some votes on ballots while ignoring others. This
could explain the issue if the problem were simply that some votes cast
in the race were read by machines on Tuesday and not read by different
machines during the recount. But this can't explain why the total
number of ballots cast in the election changed by more than 3,000.

Nonetheless, the county plans to certify the recount results this week,
despite the discrepancy in the ballot numbers. County officials say it
isn't their place to question the results, although they say they are
trying to determine what happened to those missing ballots.

Abramson, the losing candidate in the judicial race, told reporters that he is exploring the possibility of a lawsuit.
This isn't the first time the Sequoia machines and Anderson have been
criticized over uncounted votes. About 700 votes went uncounted in a
special commissioners election in West Palm Beach last June. In that
election, Sequoia optical-scan machines had failed to count votes on
memory cartridges from three precincts. Sequoia maintained that the
problem was Anderson's staff and not its machines. The staff had
mistakenly fed the three cartridges into the tabulating equipment
twice, causing the machine to "suspend" the votes and not include them
in the tally. Election staff caught the problem days after the
election, but before the official election results had been certified.

Arthur Anderson has only been the county election supervisor a short
time but has been beset by criticism for most of it. He became election
supervisor in 2005 when he replaced Theresa LePore, who created the
infamous "butterfly ballot," and who is apparently writing a book about
the 2000 election.

Anderson was elected election supervisor even though he apparently had no prior experience in election administration.

Ironically, he lost his own bid for re-election in last Tuesday's race,
although he will still oversee this November's election, since his
replacement will not assume office until January. A runoff race in
November will decide the winner of his job, since neither of the two
candidates vying for his position obtained enough votes last week to
forestall a runoff. Like Anderson, neither of the two candidates hoping
to replace him has experience running elections.